Search results for ""Ashgrove Publishing Ltd""

The ambitious and flawed John Deed has made many enemies during his career both as a QC and as a judge on the High Court bench. While presiding over a murder trial, Deed comes to suspect that it is a vindictive politician who should be in the dock for the crime. As he investigates this avenue, powerful people in government conspire to create the opportunity to pull him down once and for all. Deed's persistence in trying to get at the truth brings threats both to him and his on-off lover, Jo Mills QC, and he then finds himself accused of a heinous crime. As circumstantial evidence piles against him, soon there is little help for Deed either from friends or colleagues. At last his enemies see a way of settling old scores and he must face his greatest challenge ever.

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Winter came early that year. Freezing fog swept across London, knife-chill choking with cold and dirt, squeezing the hearts out of the dying, the weak-lunged, the old. The antswarm of people moved gropingly through the fog-muddied streets, slowly and painfully as if they were walking through dirty water, hunched and scarved figures coughing sour grey sputum into glove-held handkerchiefs...But in the parks the snow lay on the grass as thick and smooth as cream, ribbed the boughs of trees and with white veins and hung on the weighted-down branches in heavy tresses.'First published 1968, the focus of A. A. T. Davies' ambitious and hard-hitting novel is the relationship between Peter Keevil, disillusioned scholar and connoisseur of the perverse and the futile, and John Morann, sensualist and compulsive seducer. Their live contrast, interlock and are finally centred on a special and violent crime; deliberate, chosen and callous. For Morann this act is revenge the mutilated Anna, whose love had seemed pure and resusitating; for Keevil it provideds the liberation of a self-determined identity, that of the criminal. Their psychological race towards a mutual victim is tense and horrifying, and the result totally unexpected. This is not a 'comfortable' book - Davies transfers the world of cruelty to the more conventional landscapes of London's East End, a Scottish island, and the suburban rugger club belt - and it will undoubtedly shock and disturb many readers. Yet it will shock constructively in the way that Swift, Lawrence and Orwell do, for Davies is a writer whose bitterness of vision is complemented by a profound understanding of, and sympathy for, his characters, insight, humour, and a poet's feeling for words and images.

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In June of 1922, Marguerite Harrison, and American journalist and spy embarked from North America on what was to be an epic journey to Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia and Siberia. It was in Siberia that she was arrested by the Bolsheviks, sent 4,000 kilometres to Moscow and imprisoned there, first in the notorious Lubyanka and later in Butrykra Prison. She was threatened with a charge of espionage which could carry the death sentence or at a minimum, ten years' exile in Siberia. Ultimately, the US Government interceded and she was released. Red Bear or Yellow Dragon is one of the finest sources on Japanese society and culture in the 1920s and also offers a rare glimpse into life in the Asian steppes. Harrison undertook a highly dangerous 1,400 km trip from Beijing to Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator, through the Great Khingan Mountains and over the Gobi Desert to Chita in Siberia. She wrote: 'Most of the roads I followed were bloodstained road - some grim reminders of the World War and Revolution, others with fresh traces of blood shed since the peace.' Marguerite undertook this arduous journey to chronicle the peoples and politics of what she sensed as a stirring of new movements in Asia - the eternal sphinx - that were to severely challenge the West in the coming decades and which continue to do up to the present age.

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In 1936, as New Year's Eve looms, the first-class passengers on the Queen Mary's voyage to New York gather in the ship's glittering Ballroom to celebrate. German banker, Max Hartmann, however, will not be joining the festivities as he is found in his first-class cabin, dead from a single gunshot wound to the head. Chief suspect is one Danny Oscar Gamble, ex-soldier, ex-policeman and heroic drinker, currently working his passage as the ship's cocktail pianist. Danny must find a way to clear himself of the charge and as he attempts to do so he navigates amongst the high and low of the ship's 3,000 passengers and crew. Fast paced and with sparkling dialogue, 'Dead Ahead' also contains a cast of truly memorable characters and brilliantly conjures up the lost world of ocean travel in the years before the Second World War. 'Dead Ahead' is the first in a series of works to feature Danny Gamble.

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In 1832 a stranger arrived in Canterbury dressed like a Turkish sultan and with seemingly limitless wealth. He claimed to be Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay and said that he was the King of Jerusalem, a Prince of Arabia, the Prince of Abyssinia, and King of the Gypsies. He entranced many in the city and soon had a sizeable following among the agricultural labourers who saw in his radical politics an answer to their poverty. Some five years later after unsuccessfully standing for parliament and being incarcerated in a mental asylum `Sir William’ led the last armed uprising in England that left twenty dead and many seriously wounded at what became known as the Battle of Bossenden. Who was `Sir William’ if he was not who he claimed to be? Who indeed? And why? The Lion of Canterbury is a haunting narrative written with particular sensitivity to the language of the period that brings readers into the heart of the strange story of Sir William Courtenay.

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The Hooligan details the physical and psychological construction of a concentration camp, but, in a literary masterstroke, omits the war years to plum the bitter harvest of the immediate post-war period.

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In search of adventure, Inspector Guy Pearson joins the Palestine Police Force under the British Mandate. The year is 1938. Both Palestinians and Jews, at war with each other, regard the British as an occupying power. There is widespread civil disturbance. Pearson himself becomes a victim of a bomb and is nursed back to health by the native-born Rachel. They become lovers. But their relationship becomes known to the Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organisation. Threats are made against her and her family is blackmailed. When the news of the Holocaust emerges at the end of the war, agitation for greater Jewish immigration and statehood for Israel sparks new violence. The Palestine Police have to hold the line between competing forces, often at grave risk to themselves. Amid the chaos of the British withdrawal from Palestine and open warfare between Jew and Arab, Guy and Rachel must decide where their destiny lies.

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Realise then, said the hog, your unfathomableness with everything - your organic unfathomableness. With that, the sty fell silent. So begins this capering odyssey for hog and human (along with a cast of most unusual life-forms) on a phenomenal and phenomenological ride through the cosmos.

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This is an account of the author's investigation, on behalf of the Canadian government, into the life and ideas of the eccentric genius Nikola Tesla. This is a completely revised and redesigned edition, with a new introduction by the former head of the Tesla Museum, a new chapter and a selection of photographs of Tesla and his work in search of the holy grail of electricity - the transmission of power without loss. As a student in Prague in the 1870s, Tesla "saw" the electric induction motor and patented his discovery, -the first of many inventions whose plans seem to have come to him fully fledged. He worked for the Edison company in Paris before emigrating to the US and battling with Thomas Edison himself to ensure that alternating, rather than direct current, became the standard. He sold his patent in the induction motor for $1 million dollars to George Westinghouse, who used this system for the Niagara Falls Power Project. Moving to Colorado Springs, Tesla worked on resonance, building enormous oscillating towers in experiments which still intrigue today. In later life Tesla became a recluse, bombarding newspapers with eccentric claims, including energy transmissions to other planets. Though he died alone and virtually forgotten, rumours gradually grew that Tesla had made further remarkable discoveries. In an attempt to replicate his experiments, people still build Tesla towers and puzzle over the possible link with low-frequency broadcasts which can supposedly disrupt the weather and affect the human mind.

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In the early 1950s, Colonel Michael Charteris takes command of a battalion of the King’s African Rifles during the beginning of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. As the British authorities struggle to create an effective and consistent response to the violent unrest, Michael oversees the difficult task of training his British and native troops to become a force that can overcome the jungle tactics of the Mau Mau. Through the Howarths, a British farming family near Mount Kenya, Charteris meets Jane, the governess of the Howarth’s daughter, Naomi, and they slowly begin a romance. When Jane and Naomi are abducted by the Mau Mau, Michael’s professional and personal worlds collide. 'An African Romance' takes the reader into these turbulent times, when native families were torn apart by conflicting loyalties, when the British Army faced serious questions as to its conduct, and when Independence was in Kenya’s futute.

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Recently graduated from Oxford University, idealistic and headstrong Jeremy Ashland obtains a job teaching English at a language school in the Casablanca of the 1960s. Determined to be accepted as an enlightened foreigner at a time when Moroccan society is emerging from the trauma of colonialism, he plunges dangerously into local and expatriate circles. 'Mauresque' is also the story of Jeremy’s forbidden love for an upper-class Moroccan girl with revolutionary aspirations – a relationship that mirrors the tensions between Moroccans themselves in their search for a new nationhood. Evocative, stylistic and wide-ranging, Mauresque immerses the reader in a world of clandestine relationships, political intrigue, drug smuggling, murder and sorcery.

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During a remarkable lifetime, Andrew Sinclair has bridged the worlds of university and literature, art and cinema. A child of the Second World War, he has known many of the leading figures of the past seventy years - ranging from William Golding to Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter to Francis Bacon, Robert Lowell to Graham Greene, as well as publishing such classic screenplays as 'The Blue Angel', 'The Third Man' and 'Stagecoach'. He also directed a number of films including Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood' starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole. This unique `anti-memoires' of episodes and encounters captures new insights into many of the leading creative talents and stars of their times. In his own adventures, Andrew became involved in the revolt against the Suez invasion and overground nuclear tests, the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the 1968 global student uprisings and finally in the worldwide digital revolution in education and the arts. Now in his ninth decade, this author of some 40 books, including the much-lauded The Breaking of Bumbo and Gog, Andrew Sinclair in the tradition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives looks back on a rich life and fond memories of the people he has studied and known.

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Mention female spies, and most people think of Mata Hari. But during the Roaring Twenties, Marguerite Harrison and Stan Harding were the cause celebre: two beautiful, accomplished women whose names were splashed across newspapers around the world. Almost a century later, it is easy to understand the fascination with these two remarkable women. Marguerite was a highly respectable and recently widowed American journalist and socialite from Baltimore; Stan was a runaway, a bohemian artist and dancer of British heritage who left her wealthy, religious family to make a life for herself in the expatriate community in Florence. The two women were very different, yet both were strong-willed, independent and highly ambitious women unafraid of taking risks. And both, as the Great War ended and Central Europe dissolved into violent chaos, were looking for adventure. Their paths first crossed in war-ravaged Berlin during the Armistice and the the Spartacist Uprising in 1919. Fellow travellers, they became friends and, the evidence suggests, lovers. Dodging bullets and interviewing colourful characters in war-torn Europe led these intrepid women, separately, to Bolshevik Russia, a country closed to outsiders since the October Revolution of 1917. Their fateful meeting had repercussions that spanned three decades, involving heads of state and politicians in Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia. The Lady is a Spy tells their forgotten story: that of two women who, far in advance of their time, worked as foreign correspondents, who operated as spies in dangerous shadowlands of international politics, and who were both imprisoned in Lubyanka, one of the most desperate places on earth. Their lives are reconstructed through numerous primary sources, not only the poems, diaries and letters of their friends and lovers, but also government documents (including newly declassified US State Department papers) that reveal the truth about their espionage careers and - in one case - evidence of a shocking betrayal.

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This is the true story of Louisa Carolina Colleton, whose tale could have flown from the pages of a gothic novel. In 1777, at the age of fourteen, after many adventures, the beautiful heiress inherited valuable estates on two sides of the Atlantic. As in every good gothic novel, Louisa's father died, and having been deserted by her mother, she went to live with her maternal uncle in his early Tudor manor in the depths of the Devon countryside. Eight years later she left England to salvage her inheritance, a journey which took her to the Bahamas, and then to South Carolina. On her return to England she married a dashing naval officer, with whom she had ten children. Her affairs were much commented on at the time by relations and friends: we can occasionally be privy to the chaos around her dining table, or her distress at the death of one of her children. She had another traumatic adventure on the Atlantic at the age of thirty-five, when her ship was captured by French privateers. Over the years, despite her best endeavours, her fortune was demolished by the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, corrupt lawyers, fraudulent deeds, a spendthrift husband and profligate son.

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Franz Xaver Kappus, an aspiring poet, wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke for advice in 1903, but could not have expected such a voluminous response from the acclaimed German writer. Through this correspondence, Augustus Young weaves a patchwork portrait of the enigmatic poet and his intimates.

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'I am writing this for you Saleem. I am writing about us, about how I loved you, and how I killed you.' As Avi Goldberg, the son of a Jewish pioneer, sits at a desk in a dark cell in a military prison in the Negev desert, he fills the long nights writing about his friend Saleem, an Israeli Arab he befriended on a beach one scorching July day, and the story of Saleem's family, whose loss of their Ancestral home in 1948 cast a long shadow over their lives. Avi and Saleem understand about the past: they believe it can be buried, reduced to nothing. But then September 2000 comes and war breaks out - endless, unforgiving and filled with loss. And in the midst of the Intifada, which rips their peoples apart, they both learn that war devours everything, that even seemingly insignificant, utterly mundane, things get lost in war and that, sometimes, if you do not speak of these things, they are lost to you forever. Set amongst the white chalk Galilee Mountains and the hostile desert terrain of the Negev Desert, the inbetween people is a story of longing that deals with hatred, forgiveness, and the search for redemption. The haunting poetic tone is not unlike that of Ben Okri's 'The Famished Road', whilst the themes examined are similar to those dealt with by Pat Barker in 'The Ghost Road'. The simplicity of the tone is unflinching throughout, and depicts the eternal search for a home and a sense of place.

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The Egyptian sector of the Red Sea provides scuba divers with their finest opportunity to explore the most outstanding collection of shipwrecks found anywhere in the world. This edition explores nineteen of the most important and diveable shipwrecks. It also includes details about many of the minor wrecks and a list of more than 250 sunken ships.

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A young English student, Paul, is sent to a Swiss sanatorium just after the end of the second world war. At a time when effective medication for tuberculosis was unknown, Paul undergoes an unimaginable regime of regimented medical intervention, both physical and mental. His fellow patients fare no better. Yet, as the poet Edwin Muir wrote in his original review in the Observer: 'The Rack does not deal obviously with disease and suffering; it describes, sometimes very amusingly, the life of the sanatorium: the sardonic professional kindness of the doctors, liable suddenly to break under pressure, the badness of the food, the endless pre-occupation of the patients with their symptoms, and the sexual promiscuity... Behind the book one has the impression of an unusual and powerful mind.' Graham Greene considered it a masterpiece; the Times Literary Supplement believed 'the book exercises a complete fascination...a deeply impressive performance', and Time and Tide hailed 'The Rack' as '...terrific. To read it is itself an experience.' Long out of print, the original Heinemann and Penguin editions cut out some 60,000 words of the author's original text. This Zephyr edition is a restoration of the text and provides today's reader with a chance to discover the definitive edition of one of the great English novels of the last century.

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This outstanding and greatly neglected novel of the war, revolution, civil war and early Bolshevik rule first appeared in English in 1930 under the title Quiet Street. At the story's centre is a family, Grandfather (an ornithologist), grandmother and grandchild living in a corner house in Sivtsey Vrazhek and it is through their experiences and those of their circle that we glimpse the surrounding momentous events. It was not the author's intention to fashion an abstract historical sweep but rather to focus on the experiences of individuals (and even some of those from the animal kingdom). For Osorgin, nature is a more powerful force in life than the solipsistic beliefs of humankind. At the heart of 'A Corner House in Moscow' is the portrait of the coming-of-age granddaughter, Tanyusha, and her development as an individual in spite of the surrounding chaos. Indeed, a host of memorable characters grace the novel including Stolnikov, the young university graduate who volunteers in 1914, becomes an officer and wins the St George Cross but ultimately loses both his arms and legs to an artillery shell. In the hospital he became known as 'the trunk'. 'The doctors said: "A miracle. Just look at him. There's nature for you."' Written in very short chapters, the wealth of the novel is in the vignettes of individuals and incidences. Cumulatively, they combine to affirm life over death and individuals over ideology.

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In 1912, Stefan Haase, a Rhodes scholar from Germany studying Theology at Oxford, forms a friendship with fellow student James Millward. Stefan soon meets James’ sister Beth, a young, feisty and agnostic suffragist, and the two are drawn to each other despite their spiritual and intellectual differences. The three are separated by the war ­– James in Flanders as an officer in the trenches, Stefan as pastor to a German regiment and Beth as an auxiliary in France. The bonds that they share will be severely tested as each must face the carnage, cost and upheaval of the war and its aftermath.

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